Category Archives: Aliens and Races

Dessa lack any sort of bone structure, instead resembling large rubbery globs of light gray color. The only distinct feature on their outside are their two black eye-spots, which define a Dessa’s “front”. Their brain is at their center of mass, and they have no ears, noses, or mouths.

Dessa are capable of limited shape-shifting, in that their shape is controlled entirely by their muscles. They can – and do – grow a number of pseudo-limbs as they desire; as they are immobile in their “natural form”, they habitually assume a bipedal, roughly humanoid shape, which has caused a great deal of head scratching among xenobiologists and xenopsychologists. This includes a rough approximation of a head-shape centered around the eye spots and goes so far that Dessa will form a “mouth-pocket” underneath their eyes when talking or eating. They eat by inserting food into this mouth-pocket, and then closing it while they slowly absorb nutrients from the food.

After the nutrients are absorbed, the Dessa will “spit out” the remaining matter – though this is usually done in private. Observing a feeding Dessa can be unnerving to humans.

Dessa do not see very well, and only in monochrome. Their auditory organs are internal; they hear very well in lower frequencies, and are deaf at higher frequencies – similar to how a human cannot hear a dog whistle’s sound. Dessa, though, can’t hear nearly as high in the spectrum as humans. The reliance on base frequencies also makes them very sensitive to vibrations in their environment.

Lacking mouths, Dessa have a very hard time imitating human speech and often use small speech synthesizers to aid them when dealing with other races. Among each other, they communicate by touch and by producing base sounds inside their bodies – essentially living subwoofers. These sounds carry quite far and through walls and bulkheads – Dessa spaceships need no intercoms.

Society

Dessa are asexual and reproduce by fission; a young Dessa is called a “spawn”. Dessa will form social groups of up to a dozen members; these “teams” will share resources and support each other, especially in raising spawns. Membership, except for spawns, is not based on genetic relationship but instead on shared ideology and philosophy.

Dessa polities tend to be small and are almost always based on a censensual democratic principle, though details sometimes vary. All of them are voluntary and based on common interests of the individuals, and not on geography; since any such group needs territory to support itself, larger accumulations of Dessa often come into conflict with each other. In the past, this had led to vicious cycles of wars, as newly-created groups attempted to establish themselves against pre-existing ones. Modern Dessa society follows a complex set of protocols, customs and rituals to avoid violence in such matters, and some groups of Dessa opt to settle on other worlds instead. The reliance on protocol and long negotiations cause other species to see the Dessa as “a little slow”.

Religion

Most Dessa are atheists, though some have picked up Enderran religious beliefs. All Dessa follow a form of ancestor worship in that they “believe” in the “First Spawn”, the first and original Dessa they are all descended from. According to their mythology, the First Spawn was once all alone in the universe, and created more Dessa out of himself so he would not be alone anymore.

History

The Dessa are a race native to Colonial Space; their homeworld is Lomas (1809 Core Sector). They first developed a technological civilization about ten thousand years ago. Unfortunately, details of their early history are lost in time. From what is understood, it took the Dessa a mere thousand years from the Bronze Age to building their first grav drive. It had very low thrust – about 0.01G – but this still allowed the Dessa to explore and colonize nearby star systems: They are known to have had permanent settlements on Kitami, Purpure, Velaprun and Zanzan.

Unfortunately for the Dessa, their war-like tendencies brought about a devastating interstellar war. The cause, the goals, even the names of the belligerents are no longer known; but the war ended with the annihilation of the Dessa colonies and of the destruction of the homeworld’s society; the Dessa reverted to stone age barbarism.

They had recently re-discovered reaction drive spaceflight when they were discovered by the Enderrans in circa 1200 YBE. The majority of Dessa viewed space travel with distrust – presumed to have been caused by the ancient war – but some cultures embraced the idea and joined the Enderran colonists in exploring the galaxy.

Humans are a useful baseline species for any setting. The reason is simple – The audience is human, and they know what humans are like. There is no need to specify what colors their hair has, or how tall they are – we all know these things automatically. And we can more easily relate to humans.

On Earth, humans became the One Sentient Species because we’ve been the meanest, toughest, luckiest and perhaps smartest bastards around. We’ve outlived, exterminated or assimilated all competition. It stands to reason that either the same happened – or should have happened – in our fictional settings long before the onset of civilized society.

Does it have to be this way? Yeah. Kind of.

Let’s think of the alternatives.

One: We have company, and are slowly crowding them out. This is what happened in Earth’s past, and is really only the precursor to the above-described situation. Good choice for your average fantasy campaign – and this is actually the situation in Colonial Space.

Two: Humans are slowly being crowded out. In this case, it still makes sense to pick humans as the “baseline”, it just means we’re the Neanderthals of your setting. It’s a good choice and can lead to either a dystopian setting, or a “heroic fight for survival”.

Three: A balance of power. I don’t believe this is possible; sooner or later, one species will one-up the other. Cultural or technological sophistication don’t help much, either. We didn’t stop after we got rid of the other human species, we just turned on each other – if you don’t see it, ask the Native Americans, the Rwandans, the Tibetans, and so on. You get the point.

Humans in Colonial Space

Enderra was a multi-species planet. Humans, Endari, Mineons and Thurin made it off the homeworld alive; many others did not. The short explanation is that these four races had developed a series of historic alliances against common threats – and there has simply not been enough time for anybody to get the upper hand; as illustrated by the Endari’s possible off-world origin.

Let’s put this into in-Universe terms:

Humans dominate the major interstellar nations of Colonial Space. This is not due to their greater intelligence or physical strength; indeed, comparative xenobiology shows that humans are mediocre in both aspects. Instead, humans have a much higher reproduction rate than the other Enderran peoples. More children who reach maturity quicker has two effects: One, humans can adapt more easily to changing conditions (both in terms of biological evolution as well as cultural change) and two, it means that human society can more easily absorb deaths caused by hostile environments and wars.

This dominance is not a new development of the space age, but was already in effect back on the original homeworld, Enderra, where most powerful nations were ruled by humans. It was humans who led the age of discovery in their sailing ships and colonized new continents. Humans spearheaded space exploration. Humans led the Continuity Project, and were firmly in control of Fleet Command and the colonial administration. Both Empire and Republic are ruled by humans.

Before I go into detailing some of the races in the setting, let’s take a look at common approaches to alien design and their problems (and beenefits) and lay out what sort of aliens we will have in our setting.

Science Fiction is full of aliens who are little more than humans with some stuff glued to their forehead (and in some cases, in obvious rubber suits). To some extent this is of course necessary because aliens in science fiction are portrayed by humans, and more extreme makeup or even CGI is expensive (and used to be impossible). Still, this is one trope that I should avoid like the plague – no matter how “in genre” it might be.

That is not to say that humanoid aliens are a bad idea. There is a lot to be said for a basic humanoid shape, not the least of which is that it’s the only sentient, tool-making, technologically advanced species we know of – ourselves. If it works in one place, it’ll work everywhere.

Indeed, I expect a large number of aliens in the setting to fall into this category. It will be a tough job to make them convincing and interesting.

There is a subset of humanoid aliens, and those are the human aliens – Aliens that look to human that they are mistaken for them, and often they can interbreed with humans, too. These exist in many, many settings – Spock and the Vulcans, the humans in Star Wars, Elves and other fantasy races, Vineans from Yoko Tsuno, H. Beam Piper’s Freyans, and so on. They may be slightly odd – Spock’s supposedly somewhat greenish, and has long ears; Vineans are blue, and so on – but they are identical with humans in every other respect.

In general, these are a problem because they make no sense. There’s always the Ancient Astronauts approach that is so over-used (Traveller, Battlestar Galactica are notable examples), but that’s pretty much it. Parallel evolution won’t account for it.

However, in my particular case I will actually use human aliens. Humans, Endari, Thurin, and Mineons are all refugees from Enderra, and Enderra is – as you may be aware – a D&D fantasy world. The Endari are Elves, the Thurin are Dwarfs, and the Mineons are Gnomes. Just don’t tell anybody – it’s a secret.

It includes all aliens made to be truly alien. When creating bizarre aliens we need to keep in mind that they also have to be functional – that is, they need certain features such as hands to be able to build a tool-using, technological civilization. A whale, for instance, might be sentient, but he will never build a fire. And when used as characters, it becomes more and more difficult for the audience to emphasize with these truly strange aliens, which is why they are usually antagonists or mere mysteries or flavor.

What capabilities do aliens have?

It often seems that designers give their creatures and monsters all sorts of nifty powers. Some of these make sense, some are borderline, and some are impossible. Fundamentally, I think that if an animal species on Earth has a certain feature or ability, then one of our alien species can have that same ability. The important thing is that we need to consider the implications of such biology when we then design their culture.

They will not have truly fantastic features – invisbility, for example – but I’ll get back to you on breaking this self-imposed rule at some point, too.

Species vs Culture

One last important distinction that I need to point out is that “species is not equal to culture”. Again, many fictional setting offend on this count – mostly because it is easier on both designer and the audience. All Vulcans are logical and emotionless. All gnomes are terrifying engineers. All Hutts are criminals. All Orcs are evil brutes.

Obviously, I will not have the time and creative energy to create hundreds of cultures for each species, but I’d like to create at least a few distinct variations each to avoid this trope.

The BBC posted an article about modern designs of research stations in the antarctic. There are some really, really gorgeous designs and these are of course much more practical than ye olde wooden shed.

This was posted on Reddit a while ago; someone created graphics showing what Earth sunsets may look like if our Sun were replaced with another star. I do not know how accurate these images are, but they are surely beautiful:

Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet, in the system, J1407b, which is 200 times the size of the ring system of Saturn. There are also gaps in the rings which they think indicate the presence of moons there. The Contact Light setting has got to have at least one gigantic ring system like this!

Ancient Star System

In other news, Kepler has found an ancient planetary system. The system, Kepler-444, is 11.2 billion years old. It has at least five planets – all of them too hot to support life – but it means ancient systems can exist amidst much younger stars. Planets on which civilizations rose and fell long before life even got started elsewhere.